Half-tonne piece of Soviet rocket to crash back down to Earth in comin

A car-sized piece of Soviet rocket is expected to come crashing back down to Earth in the coming days, after 53 years in orbit. 

“It’s a half-tonne thing falling out of the sky at a couple of hundred miles an hour. That’s going to hurt if it hits you,” said one astronomer to Sky News.

Cosmos 482 was destined to land on Venus after being launched from the USSR’s spaceport in what is now Kazakhstan in 1972.

Instead, the upper stage of the rocket, which was responsible for powering it out of orbit, failed.

“The upper stage didn’t work right and it left just the probe in orbit around the Earth,” said Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell.

Parts of the rocket re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in the 1980s but one chunk remained in orbit, which was thought to be debris left from the spacecraft.

“Years later, I went and looked at the data and went, ‘This debris […] stayed up a lot longer than the other stuff. It seems to be denser. It’s not behaving like debris,” said Mr McDowell.

“I realised that it was the Venus entry capsule from Cosmos 482, which has got a heat shield on it [strong enough] to survive the crushing force of Venus’s atmosphere.”

Now, the heat-protected capsule is on a collision path with Earth, with astronomer Marco Langbroek predicting it will hit around 10 May.